[Brookside]

In the lobby of Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research, a BMW Z4.


BMW’s Custom-Made University

by Lynley Browning/NYT, August 29, 2006
When Clemson University received $10 million from the German automaker BMW in 2002, the money helped jump-start a $1.5 billion automotive research and educational center. It also led to a partnership that both the automaker and the university acknowledge has grown extraordinarily close.
In return for the largest cash donation ever received by the school, Clemson gave the company some unusual privileges, including a hand in developing a course of study. Clemson’s president drives a silver BMW X5 sport utility vehicle, compliments of BMW, whose only North American plant is 50 miles away.

At Clemson’s urging, BMW in large part created the curriculum for an automotive graduate engineering school. The company also drew up profiles of its ideal students; it gave Clemson, a state-supported university, a list of professors and specialists to interview, and even had approval rights over the school’s architectural look.

With its first students to be in class this fall, the project, known as the Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research, is a particularly rich example of cooperation between a multinational corporation and a university. Several automotive suppliers, including Michelin, the tire company, and the Timken Company, a maker of bearings, have also contributed financing to the project, in part by endowing professorships at the new graduate school.

But BMW is the lead player. Details about the arrangement between Clemson and BMW have emerged from a lawsuit brought last year by a Florida developer who claims the university had signed a deal with him to start an automotive center.


Clemson’s graduate engineering center, near the International Center for Automotive Research.


Clemson’s original plan with the developer was to build a high-speed wind tunnel that would cater to Nascar race teams and carmakers, including BMW. But the developer claims that BMW muscled him aside to pursue its far more ambitious plans.

Some critics wonder whether the university is blurring the line between academia and business and question how much control companies should have in such partnerships.

Alliances between universities and corporations are not uncommon, but some have drawn fire. In 1998, the University of California,Berkeley, and the pharmaceutical company Novartis, reached a $25 million deal to develop drugs, which was later criticized by some students and faculty members as compromising academic freedom. Other university partnerships, some with automakers, have been less controversial. Ohio State University, for example is working with General Motors, Ford, DaimlerChrysler and Honda on fuel efficiency and other projects.

“It’s a new model to invite private interests to partner so aggressively with you,” said Robert T. Geolas, the director of the International Center for Automotive Research, which the university regards as crucial to its goal of becoming a Top 20 public university. But Mr. Geolas added that “there ought to be a way to put together the two without disrupting their core missions.”

Prof. Sheldon Krimsky, who teaches urban and environmental policy and planning at
Tufts University and has written on the commercialization of universities, said, “It looks like you’ve got a profit-making corporation that’s calling the shots in a university setting.”

Robert M. Hitt, manager of public relations at BMW’s plant in Greer, S.C., says that “BMW has not captured Clemson.” But he later added, “Where are we going to get our future managers from, our future department heads?”

Dr. Christian E. G. Przirembel, Clemson’s vice president for research and economic development, argued that although BMW and Clemson had “two very different missions and very different cultures, we are a not-for-profit, and our core mission is to educate.”

The partnership, he said, is in line with the university’s land-grant mission of helping drive the regional economy.

Japanese and German carmakers have turned the region into a Detroit of the South. According to state figures, the auto industry employs 31,000 people in South Carolina.The BMW S.U.V. that Clemson’s president, James F. Barker, is driving is part of a pool that the automaker has provided to state leaders.

A Clemson spokeswoman, Sandy Woodward, said the car, which can be traded in every 10,000 miles, was assigned to Mr. Barker by the Clemson University Foundation. Mr. Barker’s employment contract, like those of many university presidents, includes the use of a car.

Merrill Goozner, director of the Integrity in Science Project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group based in Washington, said the use of the car was highly unusual given the partnership between Clemson and BMW.

The Florida developer who is suing Clemson, Clifford D. Rosen, contends in the court papers that BMW and state officials worked together to push him out of a deal he had with Clemson. Mr. Rosen claims that BMW threatened to take its business elsewhere unless it could make the project serve its own research and educational needs.

The lawsuit has produced documents that indicate how much control BMW sought in the project.

Handwritten notes from the files of Doug Richardson, the chief financial officer of Clemson’s endowment, of an exchange between Clemson and BMW officials say that “BMW is going to drive the entire campus.” The notes, dated August 2002, were obtained by Mr. Rosen’s lawyer through discovery and later filed with the court.

The notes also indicate that BMW officials were sharply critical of Clemson officials’ initial plan to include Mr. Rosen in the project.

By September 2002, a letter written by a lawyer at Nelson, Mullins, Riley & Scarborough, a law firm representing the university, said that Clemson would “ensure that while grants and endowments may be received from other automotive manufacturers, BMW will have an exclusive status with regard to the Clemson campus.”

Through its new school and unusual partnership with BMW, Clemson becomes the first university in the nation to offer a doctoral degree in automotive engineering.

The Center for Automotive Research is being built in stages on 250 wooded acres along Interstate 85 on the outskirts of Greenville, 50 miles northeast of the Clemson campus.

[Brookside]

Better the University of BMW rather than the U. of NASCAR?
I think this is to the good.
The linkage between business and universities is a reality- crossed long ago- it's part of academia...for better and worse.
Institutions of higher education in the U.S. are under economic pressure to survive- not just simply by filling enrollment quota's,
but to advance their prestige in the educational community...to upgrade their campus, hire prestigious faculty,
and build savings against the time when enrollments begin to dwindle.
Making alliances between BMW and Clemson looks to be a positive step for the school and the company and the taxpayers of South Carolina.